One interesting American thing (a technical term, meaning a moment or event, a text, a controversy, an idea, a figure, or whatevertheheckelse I think of) per day, from Ben Railton, a professor of American literature, culture, history, and, natch, Studies.

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MyAmericanFuture

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

January 27, 2015: AmericanStudying Sports Movies: Hoosiers and Rudy

[Each of the last
few years, I’ve used the Super
Bowl week to AmericanStudy some sports
histories and stories. This year I wanted to do the same, focusing this
time on sports movies and what they can tell us about American culture and
identity. Be a good sport and share your thoughts in comments, please!]

On the appeal of
underdog champions, and the untold sides to their stories.

If yesterday’s
two types (heroic losers like Rocky Balboa and lovable losers like the Bad News
Bears and Costner’s protagonists) occupy two spots along a spectrum of sports
movie protagonists, then heroic underdog champions occupy a third, even more inspiring
slot. Such characters are as admirable and heroic in their personal qualities
as Rocky, but seek something more than just going the distance—they want to
achieve the unlikeliest of victories, to knock off the seemingly unbeatable
champion. Perhaps the most striking such underdog champions in both sports and
sports movie history are the Miracle
on Ice hockey gold medalists of 1980—but since that group was still an
Olympic team for one of the most successful nations in Olympic history, I would
argue that the midwestern protagonists of Hoosiers (1986) and Rudy (1993), both
films directed by David Anspaugh and written by Angelo Pizzo, provide even more
clear examples of this type.

It’d be hard to
decide which of those inspired-by-a-true-story underdog victories is more
unlikely and more inspiring. The Hickory high school team in Hoosiers (based loosely on Milan
High’s 1954 championship season) is coached by two men as collectively flawed
as Buttermaker in Bad News Bears—Gene
Hackman’s Norman Dale has been dismissed from his prior job for losing his
temper and striking a student; Dennis Hopper’s Shooter Flatch is an alcoholic town
outcast—and has barely enough players to field a team, yet goes on to win the
state championship against a vastly more deep and talented South Bend team. Daniel
“Rudy” Ruettiger, whose life and events are portrayed relatively
close to accurately by Sean Astin and company, is the undersized son of an
Illinois factory worker who refuses to give up on his dream of playing football
for Notre Dame, overcoming numerous challenges and obstacles and finally making
his way onto the team and into the final game of the season, in which he sacks
the quarterback on the final play and is carried off the field by his
teammates. Having critiqued lovable loser films for their merely pyrrhic
victories, it’d be hypocritical of me not to applaud films that depict underdog
victories, and such stories are indeed undeniably appealing and affecting.

Yet in order to
tell their stories in the way they want, these films also have to leave out a
great deal, elisions that are exemplified by the way racial issues are not
addressed in Hoosiers. For one thing,
Hickory’s opponent in the championship game, South Bend, is intimidating in large
part because it features a racially integrated team, which would have been a
significant rarity in 1952 and which would seem to make them a team worth our
support. And for another, as James Loewen has written in his groundbreaking book
Sundown Towns
(2005), southern Indiana in the early 1950s was a hotbed of overt and violent
racism; to quote Loewen, “As one Indiana resident relates, ‘All southern Hoosiers
laughed at the movie calledHoosiers because the movie depicts blacks
playing basketball and sitting in the stands at games inJasper. We
all agreed no blacks were permitted until probably the '60s and do not feel
welcome today.’ A cheerleader for a predominantly white, but interracial
Evansville high school, tells of having rocks thrown at their school bus as
they sped out of Jasper after a basketball game in about 1975, more than 20
years after the events depicted so inaccurately inHoosiers.” Such histories don’t necessarily
contrast with those featured in these films—but it would be important to
complement the films with fuller engagement with their perhaps less triumphant
contexts.

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#NoConfederateSyllabus

In response to the controversy over HBO's proposed show Confederate, Matthew Teutsch and I have collaborated on #NoConfederateSyllabus, a Google Doc that you all can contribute to as well. Check out an intro here: